Thanks to Dennis for pointing out that the last few lines of the article and the footnotes were missing. They have been added.
(Continued from Part 1.)
The Drum Doorway
Marylyn: Jim, you said each of us will have some ways that work better than others. What is the most effective way you connect with your Higher Power?
Jim: The best way for me is through drumming — a full drumming ceremony — though it’s not something you can do at work or with time constraints. It requires setting time aside for that activity and that alone, without distraction and with all the time in the world to do it.
That’s because, once you start drumming and take off (that is, into spiritual ecstasy), you enter all-time-no-time. You could be drumming for what seems like 15 minutes and two hours have passed; or vice versa. Time doesn’t really matter.
In fact, in what we call reality, time is important, but in the world of Spirit, time doesn’t matter at all. Time is nothing, nor is distance. Those are foreign concepts in non-ordinary reality where Spirit resides — what’s “really real.”
The secret to riding the drum into non-ordinary reality is to measure your beats to coincide with a multiple of the base-resonant frequency of the Earth: to literally let the heartbeat of the Earthly Mother carry you into what’s “really real.” There, in non-ordinary reality, you can go wherever you want to go: journey through dimensions, talk with your spirit guides and teachers face to face, get your questions answered, or just view events in any time — past or present, or right here, now, on Earth (the Middle World) — from the vantage of non-ordinary reality.
To me, that’s the mother lode of Higher Power, entering the realm of the Stillpoint, riding your Mer-Ka-Ba through dimensions. But it does require a teacher to learn how. And you also should learn first what your Power Animal (or Guide) is, and how to use this Guide to protect you on your journey.
There are some “bad guys” out there you possibly could encounter, mostly fourth-dimensional beings. The only power they really have is that of your own fears, but you can damage yourself if you don’t know how to deal with them.
Marylyn: Are there techniques for using the drum that don’t require a teacher?
Jim: Yes. These fall within the “meditation doorway” to finding your Higher Power.
Find a nice, small drum, say 13-inches, and lie down, beating softly as you roll it up and down your body. You will notice that the tone is different at each Chakra. Continue a steady beat, pulling slightly away from your body, and listen as the drum begins to bring the tones of your chakras into harmony.
The drum is balancing your chakras. It’s a great way to relax after a hard day and take you to the doorstep of the Stillpoint.
Once you are in a meditative state — balanced, calm, with clear, open mind — you can perceive your Still, Small Voice.
How to User Our Higher Guidance
Marylyn: How can we use this connection with Higher Power to help solve our problems?
Jim: First, we must realize that our Higher Power is not going to solve all of our problems. It can give us guidance, but we have to do some work. Each problem we face, in a spiral of increasing difficulty, is a test of what we have learned. We confront the same problems again and again until we master them.
The key is to place ourselves in an energetic position to act, not react, using all our powers. We can use the Four Doorways. We can create our own reality. The solutions may come through miracles, or they may simply come through the reality we choose to create when confronted with a problem.
We are not powerless. We, as a co-creator with God, have all the power of the universe. We don’t need a “guru” or someone else to solve our problems for us; we have everything we need at any moment. That is the power of Now — the eternal gift of power, where all solutions are available if you know how to look. But we must find the tools and learn to use them.
Marylyn: I know we need to learn to look at our problems as Godsends? But they are often quite painful and distracting. How can we do this?
Jim: Gratitude plays a part. Each problem that knocks on our door is not totally an unwelcome visitor, as it always brings a gift. Let us say, for example, that your partner wants “more space.” This can be a problem, raising fears of loss and separation. But it also gives you more space — space to be you, to do what makes you happy.
Suppose you have an argument with your partner. That can be a problem. But remember, dissention only occurs when the ego is involved. When you discern how the ego is involved, the problem can be solved.
If you repeatedly crash against your limits, you can see that as a message for what it is — a need to create and live within boundaries.
You may have to search for the “gift” in each problem, and it may require work, but it’s there. As we have all heard, God never shuts a door without opening a window, and our problems, uniquely crafted for us by ourselves, are never bigger than we can handle, though they may test our abilities and force us to grow and change.
The best we can do is learn to use personal tools for healing, growth, and development, finding our best, most natural, personal doorway for inner guidance. And we need to use those tools and not rely totally on other people.
But of course God often does speak through other people. And when we need help, we need to be humble enough to ask for it without shame. A doctor doesn’t remove his own gallbladder!
Marylyn: What happens if we don’t use the tools of spiritual practice to assist us in our lives?
Jim: If we don’t take the tap on the shoulder from Spirit to address our problems and use our tools, then the spiral of Ascension will keep sending stronger and stronger messages until the Mack truck arrives that will smack us down.
We have ultimate control over our problems and their solutions. We created them; they are unique to us, they belong to us. If we ignore them we can be swallowed up by them. One way or another, we must confront them.
Reaching the Stillpoint
Marylyn: Other than helping us to receive insight about our problems, what is our overall purpose in learning to contact Higher Power?
Jim: I think the purpose of all this — of using the doorways (and the modalities of alternative or energy medicine) — is what we spoke of earlier: to find the Stillpoint.
Understanding the Stillpoint involves the nature of time and reality. Spirit doesn’t operate in our system of time, but operates in all-time-no-time. Our conception of time is sequential . . . one, two, three. But real time, what’s “really real,” is all at once, all the time. The past, present, and future are one. We sort events to make them fit our physical understanding of time, and thus we create the misconceptions upon which we base our actions. And we call these misconceptions “reality.”
This all-time-no-time, or “really real” time, is where you go when you connect with your Higher Power. That is the Stillpoint, where all healing comes from, the energy of connecting with Ascended Masters, of touching your authentic self. It’s the single point from which all healing, spiritual, and energy modalities — Shamanism, Reiki, Flower of Life, and so on — find their power, their Source of Being. All religions are based on the mechanics of reaching this Stillpoint.
Stillpoint speaks to the heart and to the mind more often through symbols, not words. Words are left-brain, linear, rational. Whereas our total understanding, our greater dimensional awareness or consciousness, is right-brained, the place of dreams, intuition, and holistic conception. Here, symbols speak volumes.
In varying degrees, we complete the circuit of right-brained/left-brained consciousness (like dolphins and whales do naturally, using both sides of their brains as one) to bring this Stillpoint energy into 3D reality, to find insight and guidance or to effectuate healing in self and others.
So, how do we find the Stillpoint? The four Doorways are some of the ways. We can dance. Or we can just simply be still and totally present.
The challenge is trying to live in the Stillpoint. That is, seeing ordinary reality and having non-ordinary or extra-ordinary reality be perceived at the same time. But with the Earth changes under way, the veils are getting thinner, and it’s becoming easier.
As Gregg Braden has described, and Drunvalo has explained through Sacred Geometry, as the base-resonance frequency of the Earth goes up and the magnetics of the planet go down, we are on the path toward a global Stillpoint in 2012. This will be the Shift of the Ages, as the Maya, Hopi, and others predict.
The challenge for us is to see and be with the changes as they take place. That is the path of Ascension. Being here now in this dimension, totally present, grounded, connected with the Earth, and with the Earth Mother in our hearts and bodies — and yet at the same time being connected with the all-dimensional guidance of Higher Power.
Marylyn: To sum all this up, what thoughts would you like to give our readers?
Jim: Our world’s polarity — good, bad, short, tall — must be understood as Oneness. We must “be” there. The goal is Ascension, the method is Christ Consciousness. We chose the times we are living in — we chose this world, the bodies we inhabit, the parents who bore us. Everything around us is a spiritual lesson in material form. We have only to discern the meaning in our lives, our Soul’s purpose in being here now.
In the universal hologram, Higher Power gives us individual and collective challenges. How we solve our individual challenges determines the collective consciousness. President Bush aside, the challenge for humanity, collectively and individually, is not war but peace, not protesting for peace (which is simply warring for peace) but being peace.
That peace is found in the Stillpoint, where there is no polarity. It’s not about a war between good and evil, but the challenge of integrating good and evil, in compassion, so they are one. In that integration we become the Mind of God.
We must do the work to see this ourselves and help others to see and become this awareness — even if they are not conscious of doing the work. It’s our role. Our duty. Our service. It’s who we are. That is my challenge now: learning to live in the Stillpoint.
Connecting with our Higher Power, living in the Stillpoint, is the ultimate doorway to Ascension.
Prana Breathing
Prana breathing basically means using your imagination to breathe prana into your entire body, usually through the crown chakra, rather than simply breathing air into your lungs through nose and mouth. It is a way of preparing mind and body to connect with higher realms.
To do prana breathing:
- You can do this standing up or sitting. For the sitting position, just get comfortable, with your hands resting in your lap, back straight, and feet flat on the floor.
- Take a deep breath into your diaphragm. Imagine that this breath is made up of golden particles of light that enter through the top of your head and fill up your entire body and energy field.
- Hold this breath for a few seconds, as you see your whole body and aura sparkling with this golden light.
- Now, release this breath, contracting the diaphragm and mentally allowing this golden light to exit your body through the heart chakra.
- As you continue, allow your breathing to slow down. And you can move the light around in different ways. You might release the light into the Earth through your feet (if you are standing) or base chakra (if you’re sitting down).
- Repeat this breathing process until you feel your body is relaxed and your mind is calm and quiet.
- You might also want to imagine the “breathing tube” that Drunvalo speaks of. You can see prana entering the breathing tube both from the crown chakra and the base chakra, meeting in the heart, and expanding from there to fill up your body and aura.
According to Drunvalo, in ancient times it was normal to breathe in this way, and there was an entire science involving different ways of visualizing where the prana would meet and how it would circulate once it was gathered into the person’s energy field. You can experiment with this!
(1) The all-time-no-time point of power is expressed in the distance-healing Reiki symbol Hon-sha-ze-sho-nen.
(2) Mitakuye Oyasin is a Lakota phrase that means “All My Relations.”
(3) See MayanMajix.com.
(4) See, for example, EWebTribe.com/StarSpiderDancing/wheel.html.
(5) This suggestion, to look at our hands, originated with Carlos Castenada in the teachings of his nagual, Don Juan. See also Seth Dreams, Becoming a Dream-Art Scientist, and other articles in the May 2003 Spirit of Ma’at.